Resource Library

October 9, 2007 Teaching & Learning webinar presented by Norean Sharpe, Babson College, and hosted by Jackie Miller, The Ohio State University. Writing can be a wonderful tool to help illuminate what students are learning in our statistics courses. Examples and strategies to include writing in your teaching toolkit -- and to increase the writing skills of students -- include team assignments, weekly case reports, in-class questions, and others. This webinar shares effective approaches and assignments gleaned from twenty years of experience using writing in introductory and upper-level statistics courses.

December 11, 2007 Teaching and Learning webinar presented by Mark L. Berenson, Montclair State University, and hosted by Jackie Miller, he Ohio State University. As we consider how we might improve our introductory statistics courses, we are constrained by a variety of environmental/logistical and pedagogical issues that must be addressed if we want our students to complete the course saying it was useful, it was relevant and practical, and that it increased their communicational, computational, technological and analytical skills. If not properly considered, such issues may result in the course being considered unsatisfying, incomprehensible, and/or unnecessarily obtuse. This Webinar focuses on key course content concerns that must be addressed and engages participants in discussing resolutions. Participants also had the opportunity to describe and discuss other content barriers to effective statistical pedagogy.

April 8, 2008 Teaching and Learning webinar presented by Beth Chance and Allan Rossman, Cal Poly - San Luis Obispo and hosted by Jackie Miller, The Ohio State University. Math majors, and other mathematically inclined students, have typically been introduced to statistics through courses in probability and mathematical statistics. We worry that such a course sequence presents mathematical aspects of statistics without emphasizing applications and the larger reasoning process of statistical investigations. This webinar describes and discusses a data-centered course that we have developed for mathematically inclined undergraduates.

May 13, 2008 Teaching and Learning webinar presented by Joy Jordan, Lawrence University and hosted by Jackie Miller, The Ohio State University. Writing can be an effective instrument for students learning new concepts, and there is a plethora of writing-to-learn research. This Webinar summarizes important findings from the writing literature, as well as providing specific writing-assignment examples for the introductory statistics classroom.

July 8, 2008 Teaching and Learning webinar presented by Shonda Kuiper, Grinnell College and hosted by Jackie Miller, The Ohio State University. Many instructors use projects to ensure that students experience the challenge of synthesizing key elements learned throughout a course. However, students can often have difficulty adjusting from traditional homework to a true research project that requires searching the literature, transitioning from a research question to a statistical model, preparing a proposal for analysis, collecting data, determine an appropriate technique for analysis, and presenting the results. This webinar presents multi-day lab modules that bridge the gap between smaller, focused textbook problems to large projects that help students experience the role of a research scientist. These labs can be combined to form a second statistics course, individually incorporated into an introductory statistics course, used to form the basis of an individual research project, or used to help students and researchers in other disciplines better understand how statisticians approach data analysis.

February 10, 2009 Teaching and Learning webinar presented by Andrew Zieffler, Bob delMas, and Joan Garfield, University of Minnesota, and hosted by Jackie Miller, The Ohio State University. This webinar presents an overview of the materials and research-based pedagogical approach to helping students reason about important statistical concepts. The materials presented were developed by the NSF-funded AIMS (adapting and Implementing Innovative Materials in Statistics) project at the University of Minnesota (www.tc.umn.edu/~aims).

May 12, 2009 Teaching and Learning hour-long webinar panel discussion presented by Laura Kubatko, The Ohio State University; Danny Kaplan, Macalester College; and Jeff Knisley, East Tennessee State University, and hosted by Jackie Miller, The Ohio State University. National reports such as Bio2010 have called for drastic improvements in the quantitative education that biology students receive. The three panelists are involved in three differently structured integrative programs aimed to give biology students the statistics that are useful in learning and doing biology. The three programs have some surprising things in common for teaching introductory statistics. All three involve connecting calculus and statistics. All three reach beyond the mathematical topics usually encountered in intro statistics in important ways. All three aim to keep the mathematics and statistics strongly connected to biology. The panelists describe their different approaches to teaching statistics for biology and discuss how and why an integrated approach gives advantages. Important issues are how to tie statistics advantageously with calculus, how to keep "advanced" mathematical and statistical topics accessible to introductory-level biology students, and how to employ computation productively. The discussion contrasts a comprehensive "team" approach (at ETSU) with stand-alone courses (at Macalester and at OSU) and refers to the institutional opportunities and constraints that have shaped the programs at their different institutions.

June 22, 2010 Activity webinar presented by Paul Roback, St. Olaf College and hosted by Leigh Slauson, Capital University. This webinar describes an in-class activity, motivated by Case Study 1.1.1 in The Statistical Sleuth, in which students compose haiku poems about statistics. Their poems are used to introduce two-sample t-tests and randomization tests. In addition, the in-class experiment leads to good discussion about experimental design issues, where students compare our design to the actual experiment described in Amabile et al.(1985) "Motivation and Creativity: Effects of Motivational Orientation on Creative Writers", Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 48(2): 393-399. I use this activity on the first day of our second course in applied statistics (Statistical Modeling), but it could easily be used in an introductory course as well. Examples of haiku poems which have resulted from this activity can be found under CAUSEweb > Resources > Fun > Poem (direct link), or at www.causeweb.org/cwis/SPT--FullRecord.php?ResourceId=1883.

May 25, 2010 Activity webinar presented by Ivan Ramler, St. Lawrence University and hosted by Leigh Slauson, Capital University. This webinar discusses an undergraduate Mathematical Statistics course project based on the popular video game Guitar Hero. The project included: 1) developing an estimator to address the research objective "Are notes missed at random?", 2) learning bootstrapping techniques and R programming skills to conduct hypothesis tests and 3) evaluating the quality of the estimator(s) under certain sets of scenarios.

This site provides information for those considering careers as a statistician. The site delves into the nature of the work as a statistician, training, other qualifications, and advancement, employment opportunities, job outlook information, and projected earnings.